Increasing efforts will be made to promote multilateral cooperation, such as those with BRICS and ASEAN countries, Shen Changyu said.
China will take the initiative in formulating and amending more international intellectual property IP rules to better support the country’s opening-up, according to a senior IP regulator.
Shen Changyu, commissioner of the China National Intellectual Property IP Administration, said, “We’ll continue our active participation in enhancing international rules on patents, trademarks, industrial designs, and geographical indications under the multilateral framework, with global exchanges on the review rules in fields of emerging technology.”
As he summarised last year’s accomplishments and introduced this year’s major work to sub-bureaus of intellectual property across the country on Friday, he made the remark.
Increasing efforts will be made to promote multilateral cooperation, such as those with BRICS and ASEAN countries, he said, adding that the administration will strengthen IP cooperation on the Belt and Road Initiative.
In order to participate in international IP-related exchanges, he continued, “we’ll also support industrial associations and social organizations.” When reflecting on the work done in the previous year, he praised the fight against erroneous trademark registration, saying that “it helped improve high-quality development in IP-related fields.”
He claimed that the administration disallowed 3,192 trademark registrations that were made maliciously, including those for the Beijing Winter Olympics’ mascot Bing DwenDwen and the FIFA World Cup’s mascots La’eeb and La’eeb. In addition, it announced the invalidity of 2,629 trademarks and restricted the transfer of 3,522 trademarks suspected of being used maliciously.
“The conflict served as a reminder that we always review IP applications rigorously in an effort to improve the business environment,” he added.
He claimed that the administration also sped up the process for reviewing IP applications in order to continuously provide stronger support for creating a creative business environment.
He added that the average time for reviewing trademark applications was cut from 10 to 4 months in 2022 and that the average time for reviewing invention patent applications was reduced from 22.6 to 16.5 months in 2022.
He added that the administration tightened its control over IP service providers and urged them to encourage discipline.
According to the report’s data, the administration summoned 4,500 of the 7,400 IP agencies after discovering problems the previous year. With the tighter regulation, 19 agencies had to stop businesses, and their licences to provide services were taken away.